Fusion-io's ioDrive: the fastest storage on Earth today

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This incredibly fast storage solution from Fusion-io is made for servers, but could easily be repurposed for home use, if you’re interested in spending a few grand on the setup. The idea is actually very simple: it’s a NAND storage array that connects via PCIe. In most computers your PCIe slots are taken up by graphics cards, since they’re the only pieces of hardware that need the kind of throughput provided by that interface. Well, servers don’t need video cards and a PCIe interface allows for some seriously high bandwidth hard drive access.

Tweaktown, bless their hearts, compared the thing to a single $600 high-performance Intel SSD and to a 8-platter RAID array of 15,000RPM Seagate HDDs. The results of the test confirmed that the ioDrive is the fastest option by a mile — it set a new record in one of their storage speed testing suites, beating the previous record by a good 30 percent. While the single SSD performed well under some conditions, the read speed was way better on the ioDrive and read access time was reduced to a hundredth of a millisecond in some cases. Hot damn!

Of course, this crazy thing isn’t for everyday use; the hardware is designed for servers that need the lowest possible lag time combined with the largest amount of storage available. The ioDrive comes in flavors up to 320GB, but that’ll set you back nearly 15 grand. However, for businesses and services where speed is all-important, any price is worth that extra bump in performance.